Vitro Nasu

Jacques Barzun and Friend (American Scholar)
What did a distinguished historian, and possibly a great man, see in an unkempt young would-be writer?
By Arthur Krystal | March 23, 2021

More important, he had a soothing effect on me. I was calmer in his presence, as if the world wasn’t all about struggle, competition, and jockeying for position. Somehow he seemed detached from such things, and it was a detachment that subtly transferred to me. And when I think back on how little I knew then and how well I thought of myself (the two obviously went hand-in-hand), I see that he came along at a moment when I needed someone who represented what adulthood could be like, even if I sensed that my own would be very different. And so, for 40 years, whenever I heard his distinct but slightly throaty voice, the world made a little bit more sense, and it was a pleasure to make him laugh.

Jacques Barzun, 30 Nov 1907 – 25 Oct 2012
Historian & Scholar dies at 104 (NYtimes)

Jacques Barzun (on vimeo)

The Achievement of Jacques Barzun (The First Things)

Cynthia Ozick – “the last of the thoroughgoing generalists,”

My notion about any artist is that we honor him best by reading him, by playing his music, by seeing his plays or by looking at his pictures. We don’t need to fall all over ourselves with adjectives and epithets. Let’s play him more.
— Jacques Barzun, in an interview with John C. Tibbetts

Barzun 100 (a blog dedicted to Barzun)

Darwin Marx Wagner
(Cover by Leonard Baskin, Typography by Edward Gorey)

Update: Endless Rewriting (Another article from American Scholar).

When a novice writer received a letter from Jacques Barzun, asking her to write a book, how could she have known what she was in for?
By Helen Hazen

(Yumi Shirakawa, Hideko Takamine, Yoko Minamida, Misako Uji and Yumiko Hasegawa visiting Elvis.)

Hideko Takamine was a Japanese actress who began as a child actress and maintained her fame in a career that spanned 50 years. She is particularly known for her collaborations with directors Mikio Naruse and Keisuke Kinoshita, with Twenty-Four Eyes (1954) and Floating Clouds (1955) being among her most noted films

Hideko Takamine

A child actress on the right was Takamine Hideko .

(Kayama Yuzo and Hideko Takamine in “Yearning directed by Mikio Naruse)

Mifune and Takamine Hideko in A Wife’s Heart

Takamine Hideko and Akutagawa Hiroshi in Mistress (film based on Ogai’s Wilde Geese)

Ōgai’s most popular novel, Gan (1911–13; part translation: The Wild Goose), is the story of the undeclared love of a moneylender’s mistress for a medical student who passes by her house each day.

Click to see large

Takamine Hideko in Naruse masterpiece..
(Wong Kar Wai was thinking of Naruse when he made In the Mood for Love.)

Gesture and pose of cinema of M.Naruse

Harvard Archive list of Naruse films

Summer Clouds, When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Floating Clouds (3 film stills)

Sad news from Variety. Bertrand Tavernier passed away

Bertrand Tavernier, French Filmmaker and Leader of a Generation, Dies at 79

Bertrand Tavernier wiki

Criterion

Daddy Nostalgia.

(Dirk Bogarde, Tavernier and Jane Birkin in Daddy Nostalgia.)

Dirk Bogard said “Tavernier knows more about the cinema than practically any director I have worked with, Visconti coming a close second.’ I have said, when asked, that Visconti is the Emperor of film, Losey is the King, Tavernier is the Genius in the minutiae of life which he gets on to a cinema screen as no one else has ever done quite so brilliantly before. Nothing very much happens in a Tavernier film. Just all of life.”

A tribute from Lisa Nesselson

Coup de Torchon – Noiret and Stephane Audran

A Sunday in a Country
Tavernier won the best director at Cannes with this film.(Exquisite and beautifully filmed family drama)

Dexter Gordon was nominated for an Oscar. (He should have won)

Martin Scorsese

Click to see large

Bertrand Taverniar with Gaspard Ulliel (click to see large)
Discussion.. how he works & state of film industry & showing off his encyclopedic film knowledge appearing with Gaspard Ulliel..(on youtube)

(Barrese and his mother Benedetta Barzini)

Discovering Benedetta Barzini in “the disappearance of my mother”

Benedetta Barzini wiki

Gerard Malanga

In December 1966, Barzini was named one of the “100 Great Beauties of the World” by the American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar. She began training at the Actors Studio around that time,[4] and in the process became romantically involved with, and later engaged to, New York poet and media artist Gerard Malanga, an early collaborator of Andy Warhol.[5] He would dedicate various works to her, such as his Poems for Benedetta Barzini and The Last Benedetta Poems.[4] Additionally, Malanga’s 1967 black-and-white film In Search of the Miraculous is an emotional, vivid poem of adoration for Barzini.

Benedetta Barzini in a dress by Norell. Photo by Irving Penn. Vogue, April 1, 1965.

Barzini was discovered at age 20 on the streets of Rome[3] by Consuelo Crespi in 1963; Diana Vreeland soon thereafter received photographs of Barzini and sent a telegram asking if she could come to Manhattan to shoot for American Vogue[3] with Irving Penn

(Benedetta Barzini and Marcel Duchamp – from “The Dissapearance of My Mother’)

(House in Bordeaux)

Vassal
(and Lacaton)

Lacaton & Vassal receive the 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize

The 2021 Pritzker Architecture Prize, architecture’s highest honor, has been granted to Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, founders of Lacaton & Vassal, the French duo renowned for their multiple sustainable housing projects and for the Palais de Tokyo, a contemporary art gallery in Paris. In their three decades of work, Lacaton & Vassal always prioritized the “enrichment of human life”, benefiting the individual and supporting the evolution of the city.

Lacaton-Vassal com

“Leon Polk Smith: Hiding in Plain Sight” installation view, Photo: Heard Museum, Craig Smith

Leon Polk Smith Hiding in Plain Sight

Heard Museum, Leon Polk Smith – Hiding in Plain Sight on display through May 31, 2021.

(Photo by Fung Lin Hall)

(Artforum Spotlight Heard Museum)

Leon Polk Smith Foundation

Lisson Gallery – Leon Polk Smith

wiki- Leon Polk Smith

Artnet – Leon Polk Smith

Leon Polk Smith was a Cherokee American painter known for works which blended Native American design and hard-edge geometrically-oriented abstract paintings on unframed canvases of unusual shapes. While his style had originally been inspired by artists such as Piet Mondrian, he took geometric abstraction a step further, cultivating the Hard-Edge and Minimal painting styles in the late 1950s. “I can’t imagine that there is an end to space. It tells us that we are to keep going, to be optimistic,” he commented on his conceptual exploration of space through art. Smith was born on May 20, 1906 and grew up on farms and ranches among Choctaw and Chickasha Native American communities in present-day Oklahoma. He graduated from Oklahoma State College (now East Central University) with the intention of becoming a teacher and then moved to New York City in 1936 to study at Columbia University’s Teachers College. It was there that he was inspired by Piet Mondrian’s paintings and Constantin Brâncuși and Jean Arp’s sculptures at the Gallatin Collection. While his early art career utilized Surrealist and Expressionist styles, he developed his own style over time that leaned more towards Modernism. In 1954, he produced a series of tondos, which helped to place him at the forefront of movements such as Hard-Edge, Color Field, and Minimalism. One of his most famous works is a series of modular paintings he created in 1967 known as The Constellations, each of which comprised multiple canvases that could be arranged in different configurations, making the walls they were hung up on meaningful parts of the installations. His works have been exhibited in museums all over the world, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City, Israel Museum in Jerusalem, MACBA in Buenos Aires, and Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Smith passed away on December 4, 1996 in New York City.

RE: Carmen Herrera and Leon Polk Smith

In 1939 she moved to New York and swiftly made connections in the Downtown art scene: Barnett Newman and Leon Polk Smith become lifelong friends. (via)

Carmen Herrara is 105 years old today.

A virtual talk, a deeper look at Leon Polk’Smith’s artistic practice (Youtube)

(In 1900, Robert De Niro and Dominique Sanda, directed by Bertolucci)
Happy birthday Dominique Sanda!
Her film career started with Bresson. A Gentle Woman..Bertolucci cast her twice ..The Conformist and 1900.. De Sica cast her in the Garden Finzi Contini.. she was also in Steppenwolf with Max Von Sydow. – her recent film was Saint Laurent..
Genraldin Chaplin and Dominic Sanda made a funny feminist film
*

Dominique Sanda is 73 years old today

(The Conformist with Jean Louis Trintignant)
Bernardo Bertolucci directed Dominique Sanda twice, 1900 and The Conformist

Azurebumble

(Michinoku)

Focus art of Toko Shinoda

Toko Shinoda wiki

Toko Shinoda (篠田 桃紅, Shinoda Tōkō, 28 March 1913 – 1 March 2021) was a Japanese artist working with sumi ink paintings and prints. Her art merged traditional calligraphy with modern abstract expressionism. A 1983 interview in Time magazine asserted “her trail-blazing accomplishments are analogous to Picasso’s”.[1] Shinoda’s works have been exhibited at the Hague National Museum, the Art Institute of Chicago, Cincinnati Art Museum, and other leading museums of the world.

See more from Artnet – Toko Shinoda

Shinoda Masahiro (retired filmmaker, husband of Shima Iwashita)is her cousin – (via Asahi )

37 Seconds Movie directed by Hikari

A story of Cerebral Palsy and self-dicovery

(Moving Shinji Somai )
Film review “Moving’ by Shinji Somai

13-year-old Tomoko Tabata provides a great anchor for the film in her debut, as the narrative seems to follow her every whim. The plethora of feelings, behaviors, and psychological statues she depicts is the highlight of a naturalistic performance, which allowed her to begin a career in acting that continues until today.